Economies and Personhood : Demand Sharing among the Wiradjuri of New South Wales

Abstract

Mountains.About twenty Wiradjuri communities, each identifying with their own particular locality, are located in or on the edges of rural towns and small cities, whose economies are based on the rich agricultural and pastoral resources of this riverine area.The Wiradjuri population, who with other Aboriginal people of south-east Australia refer to themselves as ˋKooris', is estimated at about 12,OOO people, including those in the metropolitan centres of Sydney and Canberra.Although incorporated into these towns, the indigenous residents maintain social and usually spatial distance within them.Employment in rural industries was once excellent, even though often seasonal, in past decades when Aboriginal labour was cheap, but this declined after the introduction of equal wages legislation in the 1960s.Now unemployment is high, education standards, although improving, are still poor, and there is a great need for improvements in housing and health conditions.Crime rates and drug/alcohol abuse is high.Most communities, even those with small-scale enterprises, are welfare-dependent.Wiradjuri communities are recognised as ˋAboriginal', although many Australians would call them ˋnot real Aborigines' because their oppressive experiences of colonial rule have left them without many of the cultural and material resources associated with ˋtraditional' Aboriginal lifestyles.They are perceived more commonly as people who may be of part-Aboriginal descent but who have ˋlost their culture'.What they are not seen as is hunters and gatherers, and it would not be possible for Wiradjuri people to sustain themselves, as did their ancestors until the mid-nineteenth century, through hunting and gathering.The occasional hunting of tree goanna or kangaroo are more important for their symbolic meanings to Wiradjuri people than for their contribution to their diet.It is at least one hundred years since Wiradjuri people could engage in hunting or gathering for anything other than recreational purposes-much-enjoyed ˋbush tucker'.Bush tucker once supplemented food supplied in rations on managed reserves (1880s to the 1960s).Now Kooris shop freely at the supermarket like other Australians.The country in which they hunted has been progressively fenced off for grazing and agriculture, and few edible plants have survived the introduction of hoofed animals.Some plants, growing as bushes in uncultivated areas, are still available for use in ˋbush medicines'.But Wiradjuri communities do have one characteristic commonly associated with hunter-gatherer societies: sharing.ˋSharing' is the word they most commonly use to distinguish themselves from non-Aboriginal Australians who ˋdo not share'.The term is a gloss for characteristics of Wiradjuri ways of being in relationship to one another, including their ways of distributing resources amongst each other.Wiradjuri sharing is remarkably similar to that found in Aboriginal communities throughout Australia, societies which have all had a tradition of hunting and gathering but whose different experiences of colonisation have left them with varying degrees of continuing access to this form of production.Interpretations of sharing practices among hunter-gatherers in anthropological analyses were initially dominated by economic and ecological models, associating

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